Hannah Blackwood, a director of craft brewery and bar Heyday Beer, says the visa delays are having a crippling effect on the business. Photo: Supplied
Businesses are running reduced hours - and some are closing - because of "crippling" wait times for work visas.
Employers say they are angry, stressed and frustrated, and new employees are wondering if their money will run out before the work approval arrives.
Gaetano Arico owns Stefanos pizzeria in Nelson, and has been waiting months for visas for his staff. Low on staff numbers, he is having to close one day a week and some mornings.
"So people want to have pizza, but they can't, because I'm closed," he said. "The old whole way, it was complicated - the new system is ridiculous, it's a joke.
"It's a crazy situation. One of the parameters for the accredited visa, and I understand why, you need to prove it you're in a good financial situation to be able to employ that person. But how can you do that if you lose money - by not being able to work because you can't employ any staff?"
Employers angry foreign staff waiting months for work visas
It has put him in breach of the contract he has with the cinema complex the restaurant is located in, and he was worried for his other employees.
He said another Nelson business has had to shut its doors while it waited for staff to be approved.
Hannah Blackwood is a director of craft brewery and bar Heyday Beer in Wellington's Cuba Street, and she first applied for a visa for a sales manager in May.
The delays were having a crippling effect on the business, costing it tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and causing real stress and mental health problems for existing staff, she said.
"No-one might have a job at the end of this we might need a close because that's a lot of [lost] revenue," she said. She wrote to Immigration NZ (INZ), asking them to take into account how many livelihoods depended on the business.
"The position is essential to our business, and the ongoing vacancy is placing an unsustainable burden on our team and operations," she wrote.
"There are no other current staff able to cover a large portion of the responsibilities of this role. Without this role being filled promptly, the business may be forced to close, resulting in the loss of employment for all staff."
Daily calls did not get her through to the immigration case officer, and the first visa application was declined because of an error on how long they had to advertise the position.
The current INZ wait times are seven months for the job check and visa, plus another three months if the firm does not already have accreditation.
Blackwood said her new employee - who has been in New Zealand for five years on an essential skills visa - needed to return to Canada for a wedding.
He now can not get back into the country, and worried he might not be able to this year.
"He's really going through a rough time. He's still paying rent here, his phone here, his gym here. He's got a week's worth of clothes, and he's been there since August."
Hospitality New Zealand said it was hearing from similar companies nearly every day.
Head of communications and advocacy Sam McKinnon said staff waiting for their own work visa to come through were struggling.
"The other outcome is people just leaving, leaving New Zealand. So you've got skilled staff who want to stay here, but they don't feel like they've got an option to just hang on for as long as immigration New Zealand takes to process their visa."
Immigration advisor Tobias Toohill said it was not only hospitality that was affected, and economic growth was suffering.
"Even [bigger] companies tend, at the moment, to be saying 'we don't see the point in renewing accreditation or engaging in this process'. And so the economic effect is that companies are just choosing not to hire staff.
"It takes a very small change to give them work rights, to let them keep working until the job check and work visa come through.
"Skilled people, they're not bothering with New Zealand anymore. There's better options elsewhere. The application fees have massively increased , the system's really arcane and challenging for employers and migrants, and there's been so much change that a lot of people are just going, 'I'm just going to go elsewhere'."
Migrants were surviving only on savings or family money, but it would only take a small tweak in the system to allow workers already in New Zealand and transferring from another visa, to have interim work approval, he said.
The accredited employer work visa (AEWV) has three stages, with more detailed checks introduced after lax standards brought widespread problems with fraud and exploitation.
Immigration New Zealand head Alison McDonald acknowledged the timeframes needed to improve, and said there were promising signs that they were.
"Eleven weeks for employer accreditation, 12 weeks for a job check, four months for a work visa, it can be up to - I'm not proud of that in any way. I admit it's not good enough and I can assure that the team we're working with, alongside the minister, is doing everything we can. That's why we're looking at how we use our people, our processes, how people work, how they're managed, how their caseloads are swept daily, really looking at how they make visa decisions, putting more proactive support around officers on the ground, and still trying to maintain those risk settings."
Work visas were the agency's top priority and changing the way AEWV applications were processed by grouping similar professions and employers was showing "green shoots", she said.